About halfway through “The Courier,” my wife and I agreed it was a pretty good — if obviously low-budget — action movie. At the end, we were still in agreement: Just what was the film supposed to be about? According to information on the disc, the movie originally was envisioned as a high-dollar action extravaganza […]
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Things aren’t always what they appear to be. At a glance, “The Tall Man” looks like it’s going to be yet another spooky, slasher-type movie. Instead, it turns out to be a suspenseful mystery. The town of Cold Rock, Wash., is a rural slum. Since the jobs vanished when the local mining industry shut down, […]
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Looking for entertainment? Better “Safe” than sorry. Since it stars Jason Statham of “Transporter” trilogy fame, you know right away that “Safe” is an action film. And in a genre where films are generally rated by their body counts, it delivers. Tallying the people dispatched in “Safe” is like trying to count the number of […]
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Guest review by Karen Davis “The Forsyte Saga” was first made as a British miniseries in the 1960s and was a runaway hit. In 2002, it was remade in a somewhat shorter format. That second version has just been released on DVD and includes Series 1, which introduces the original Forsyte clan, and Series II, […]
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When I first saw the plot description for “The Hunger Games,” it sounded like a really bad idea. A “Most Dangerous Game” between 12-to-18-year-olds? To the death? But it received rather good reviews, so I went to see it at the theater and came away fairly impressed. Under the deft hand of director Gary Ross, […]
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Guest review by Steve Warns “What would Jesus have done?” Dexter Morgan asks while the prom king lies on Dexter’s killing table during, of all things, their 20-year high school reunion in the opening episode of Season 6 of “Dexter.” It was revealed the prom king, sporting a tattoo of Jesus Christ over his heart, […]
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Although it originally was broadcast from 1959 to 1963, “The Untouchables” television series will always be a show of the 1970s to me. I don’t recall seeing the program when it was new. My parents weren’t the types who allowed 4-to-7-year-olds to run free at Wal-Mart at 2 a.m. (not that there were any Wal-Mart […]
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As a kid in the early 1960s, I found “Bonanza” rather difficult to fathom. It always seemed to have a “plot” that got in the way of the expected gunfights, barroom brawls, cattle stampedes and general mayhem that marked many other Westerns of the era. In short, contemplation was not one of my strong points […]
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Guest review by Karen Davis Ah, the costume drama. Viewers have sighed over that Regency hero Mr. Darcy, thrilled to the wartime adventures of Richard Sharpe and Horatio Hornblower, and followed the lusty wanderings of Moll Flanders. All of those programs, and many others, were produced for British TV, then made their way to our […]
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Somewhere, there must be a dictionary that illustrates the definition of the term “tough guy” with Mike Connors’ picture. For eight seasons, from 1967 through 1975, Connors starred as detective Joe Mannix. Unlike some of his televised contemporaries — say the laid-back Jim Rockford — Mannix was a man of action. Unfortunately for him, however, […]
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